I have been assured after consulting the entrails of the turkey starring in tomorrow’s feast that we won’t be going to war with any country that doesn’t meet all of the criteria used for the Iraq War. So until you can answer YES to all the questions on the list there’s nothing to worry about.

War Check List:

Is there oil?

Is it Islamic?

Do we lack linguists who speak the language?

Did the current government overthrow a government allied with the West?

Are we basing our intelligence estimates on a group of anti-government exiles?

Are there UN inspectors in the country?

Has Kenneth Pollack written a book about the country?

Has Colin Powell made alarming claims about the country’s weapons capabilities?

Does Laurie Mylroie hate the current government?

My view of Thanksgiving was skewed by my Father’s attitude. Having grown up on a poultry farm, he viewed the holiday as the culmination of weeks of work “processing” dozens of turkeys to be frozen and readying a few dozen more for fresh delivery. We generally ate ham when he was alive.

Having been on my Grandfather’s farm at this time of year I can understand my Dad’s attitude: our meal was subject to interruption by people picking up a fresh turkey at the last minute. A sale is a sale when you are business for yourself.

I didn’t get blown away by Hurricane Ivan, today’s tornados weren’t within twenty miles, nobody is currently shooting at me, and none of my clients has had a major problem in a couple of weeks. That may not sound like much, but there’s a great deal of charm to be found in a quiet life.

Tomorrow I will be at my Mother’s for a turkey, if the thing ever defrosts. It’s tough to do a decent augury with frozen entrails and I don’t think druids are permitted to use a microwave.

Enjoy your meal and try to forget about the world’s problems for a day: they’ll still be there on Friday.

I was listening to All Things Considered and Drew Westen had a report titled: “Media Takes Advantage of Brain’s Shortcoming”.

His basic premise was that the media has been presenting a barebones story and then having two commentators argue about the story, the assumption being that there are two, and only two, sides to every story and the sides have equal weight, without regard to facts.

Anyone who checks out the Daily Howler is familiar with this situation, and the run up to the election provided multiple cases of this behavior in the major media, often with the media providing both sides of every issue without any attempt at fact checking or even a basic review of the logic of the two sides.

Mr. Westen went on to discuss research that people seemed to ignore the facts and accept the version that makes them feel better. There doesn’t seem to be any critical thinking involved: people may be exposed two sides, but they only hear the facts and views that agree with their beliefs.

Special interest groups have been using this for years to promote their causes. Consider the Evolution/Intelligent Design battle. One side is a true scientific theory based on evidence gathered for over a century, and the other is a construct put together with the single purpose of opposing Evolution. People who have academic credentials are presented as experts to debate the issue.

This entire mess is a form of the false dichotomy: if you disprove A, B must be true, or, more often in certain forums, if you can’t disprove A, then B must be false.

The first problem I have with this trend is that there are usually more than two sides to important issues. I have investigated two-car fender-benders and have come away with a half dozen differing versions of what happened, and none of them matched the physical evidence at the scene. As any long-time investigator will tell you, there is almost nothing as unreliable as eye-witness testimony. As we now understand, the brain has a habit of filling in details from memories already stored and those memories are not usually exact matches for reality.

Perhaps the biggest problem I have with the situation is that there is no rational filtering of the claims of the two sides that get presented. If one side is presenting documented facts and the other is presenting opinion, that should be noted and more weight should be given to the facts.